Agree. I suspect we’re looking at two independently written pieces of text (the Workstation and the KDE Plasma Edition descriptions), rather than two that were written together with the intention of comparing and contrasting.
I would like to see the descriptions written by one person, with technical info rather than marketting speak.
@pg-tips is probably identifying the main issue: KDE has been promoted to the Edition status only just recently. It was added on the front page, but afaik we haven’t yet invested a dedicated effort to polish that page to accommodate for the new setup with two equal editions.
And this is indeed something to be better brainstormed together with newcomers who have a fresh perspective.
I don’t believe that either. If my statement inferred that, then I did a bad job of it.
I stand by my impressions of the relative simplicity of user customizations between the two DEs, but in terms of simple vs complicated vanilla use of either, I’d say they’re pretty close to the same.
It does make sense to make it clearer to new users that Workstation uses the Gnome DE by definition. That has nothing to do with the status of KDE in the Fedora lineup.
When we had a single edition, the idea was to actually hide all of the implementation details.
Here in the thread we have people who come to Fedora already knowing what Gnome and KDE is. But there is a part of the Fedora target audience which simply have no idea what is Gnome. Thus, while we had a single default desktop to offer, the DE was just a redundant detail.
Now the situation changed and we don’t want a newcomer to not bother with the DE choices. We need to educate the newcomer on what choices are available. But we should not just say - this is Gnome and this is KDE. We must now introduce a complete newbie to the Gnome and KDE and the whole idea of DEs.
So this is the challenge: describe to a complete newbie Gnome vs KDE choice in <280 symbols 
I get that the small panel is constraining, but once one selects the “Learn More” link, then there’s plenty of room to add a clause such as “uses the Gnome desktop environment” somewhere. If that has no meaning to a new user, then nothing is lost; if they walk in the door wanting to select a version based on a given DE, then it will.
As @pg-tips mentioned earlier, this fact was already made clear in a different short summary description, just not on the most common landing page or the page it sent curious users to.
Given that Arch installer gives the option to choose any (or no) desktop environment, could Fedora not borrow from that? Give a desktop environment option in the installer with a little overview of each?
It could theoretically be made a non-binding choice as a little DE changer could be included in case someone decides they don’t like Gnome and want to try KDE instead without going through the whole installation process again.
This is done via the everything and server installer images. I use the everything ISO myself so I can do a network install with the KDE Plasma desktop selected and a minimal number of software groups installed (only two, those being Libreoffice and Firefox, the additional KDE software groups I de-select so they aren’t installed).
We could do that. In fact we have an Everything ISO which allows you to choose whatever you like to install. But we know from experience that choices like this are indeed confusing to newbies who just want to “try Fedora”.
Again this is a very specific newbie audience which we are after. Arch doesn’t target that audience, but we do. And we know that it exists:
Check for example https://youtu.be/MVM3sRD9q8M?t=109
In that video she actually does an amazing job on learning and explaining the DEs concept, but she is already quite advanced and enthusiastic about Linux. The complete newbie would not go that far.
So the messaging on the getfedora.org should be catchy, but not scary. And we should not force a person to read pages of docs to make a choice. 280 symbols is of course a random number I just came up with, but the challenge is real.
I agree that these things should be kept simple which is why I suggested giving a little overview, I think in this case “a picture is worth a thousand words“, or maybe a GIF given modern technology. Three to five examples of what each DE looks like/how they operate, given that the installer is a fullscreen program most monitors are probably big enough to put the two side by side but a tab system would probably work fine too.
Yeah, I think a GIF might be a good idea.
Show the Overview mechanics for Gnome and the menu in the corner as default setup from KDE, and that probably would be enough to differentiate between the two for a newcomer.
And have two main editions featured in the front row and other spins as options in the smaller next row.
..Then of course Atomic versions come to mind, but that’s a conversation for another day.
F43 Beta I did 2G /boot/efi and the rest / ext4:
nvme0n1 259:0 0 953.9G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 1.9G 0 part /boot/efi
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 952G 0 part /
It wasn’t complicated, but felt a little tricky to make sure it was set right. The right sidebar tips about required partitions was helpful with /boot/efi!
I’m not sure if it would have worked, but I tried doing no partition table and just adding the partitions; the editor only let me add one partition without size choice. Selecting GPT and then adding the partitions was fine and presented size choice.
I’d sure like to see a tutorial on how to do a clean installation on a one-disk system that has a default installation disk setup from a previous installation already on it. Note: These use btrfs partitions with subvolumes root and home, which are mounted to / and /home, respectively.
I’m trying to do exactly this with the f43 beta, and I just can’t find a way do it without creating another subvolume to be mounted to /. After the installation completes, I only want to have one, and I’d like for it to be named root.
Related question: Why is all of the business of btrfs partitions so opaque in the installer?